King+Tutankhamen

Tutankhamen became king at the age of eight or nine. He was a great king and mysteriously died at 18-years- old. He lived from 1341-1323BCE. His tomb was found in the **Valley of Kings**. King Tut was neither a good nor bad king because he wasn’t a very strong ruler but tried his best for a boy king. His father is thought to be King Akhenaton and his first mother was also thought to be Kiya and was replaced by Nefertiti, Tut’s step-mother.

King Tutankhamen is the most well known pharaoh. He is well known because he is the only pharaoh that has his treasure when it was found. Some of the treasures are the “Eye of Horus”, which was made from solid gold and inlaid lapis and his “Death Mask”, which covered his face in his tree layered sarcophagus. All together, the mummy of Tutankhamen was wearing 107 treasures. King Tut died mysteriously and nobody knows why he died. His skull had a hole in the back, as if he was struck hard. But the scans that scientists had made, was not what they expected. The scanner detected that he lived after he was hit and then he died. Maybe he was murdered, had an accident, or had a disease. The Curse of the Mummy There was a legend in Egypt saying that whoever dared to open a King’s Tomb would suffer the wrath of the mummy. Lord Carnarvon knew the legend but still went on, discovered and opened King Tut in the year 1922. One of his helpers, Howard Carter who is also the founder of King Tut’s sarcophagus, found a tablet with the curse written on it and hid it right away so that it would not alarm his workers. The suspicion of the curse started in April 5th, 1923. Lord Carnarvon was bit by a mosquito on his left cheek. Then he started to get high fevers and chills. A doctor was sent to his house to check on him, but he was too late. Lord Carnarvon had already died AND at the exact moment he died, the lights went out in Cairo. That could be just a coincidence but at the same moment, his favourite pet dog in England died too.

In the year 1925, when King Tut was unwrapped, there was a scar on the left cheek which was the exact spot where the mosquito bit Lord Carnarvon, which was really strange. In 1929, eleven people who were connected to the discovery of King Tut died at an early age and very unusually. Two of them were relatives of Lord Carnarvon. Richard Bethel who was Lord Carnarvon’s secretary and Richard Bethel’s father Lord Westbury. Lord Westbury committed suicide by jumping of the building leaving a note that said, “I really cannot stand any more horrors and hardly see what good I am going to do here, so I am making my exit.

An Explanation Dr. Ezzedin Taha of Cairo University checked the health records of the museum workers, who carried the artefacts found in tombs of the great Pharaohs, and found out that many of them had been infected by Aspergillus niger, a fungus that causes fever, fatigue, and rashes. He thinks that Aspergillus niger had been able to survive for thousands of years in the tomb and got picked up by the archaeologists who entered the tomb. Dr. Nicola Di Paolo, an Italian physician found another possible fungus, Aspergillus orchraceus. According to the record of visitors of visitors to the tomb, many of them got sick.

In 1999, a German microbiologist, Gotthard Kramer, from the University of Leipzig, analyzed 40 mummies and identified several dangerous mold spores on each mummy. Mold spores can survive in the dark, dry tombs for thousands of years. Many of them are harmless, but many of them are very toxic too.

So the question is, **IS THERE REALLY SUCH A THING AS THE “CURSE” OF THE MUMMY?** 50% of the people believe the curse, but the other 50% don’t. So the chances are 50%, and 50%. At first, when I was finding facts for the “Curse of the Mummy”, according to the sites I’ve been to, there were lots of unusual thing happening, which I thought that could never be a coincidence. But after some further research, there were some very possible guesses that many scientists made. So my answer to the question is, “No, I do not believe in the curse anymore.”

Page by: ASYRAF 6a and WAN KYU 6a

"Pictures" KingTutankhamen's Death Mask: [|http://www.travelpod.com] Eye of Horus: [|http://pacificapshycic.com] Howard Carter:[|http://media-2.britannica.com]